Benedict Cumberbatch (14 page)

Cumberbatch had wanted success, not necessarily fame. If he had sought recognition it was for the work, not for him as himself. This was a bit of a shock, and the almost unanimously positive reaction on Twitter shook him slightly. He half-expected ‘people abseiling down into our garden just to get a sneak peek at us.’

After three and a half decades of being Benedict Cumberbatch, he was now being called Sherlock in the street. But he had devised a wry response: ‘When people come up to me and ask, “Are you Sherlock Holmes?”, I say, “I just look a bit like him. I’m not actually Sherlock.”’

D
espite his rise to fame in cinema and on television, Benedict Cumberbatch had not abandoned stage work. The Royal Court hired his services again in spring 2008, this time with Katie Mitchell on directorial duties, for a domestic drama by Martin Crimp. In
The City
, Chris’s marriage to Clair (Hattie Morahan) is falling apart when the company he works for is restructured, and he loses his job.

As usual, Cumberbatch conducted considerable research for the role of Chris, in which he contacted and visited support groups for the redundant. For one scene, he was obliged to visit a meat counter in a supermarket, because his character had to take on a new job as a butcher.  

The City
marked the first time the childless actor had to portray a dad on stage. He was especially nervous about one specific scene, a confrontational one with a child actor, but
ultimately felt reassured. ‘I was worried, but there are studies showing that young actors are very strongly aware of the difference between fiction and real life.’ Great care was taken in rehearsals with these junior performers, whose parents were always made aware of what was going on.

If anything, it was the audiences who could be more troublesome. During the press night performance, a mobile phone ringtone sounded persistently for several minutes. ‘There was a moment when Hattie broke off,’ said Cumberbatch, ‘and I thought about stopping and saying, “OK everyone, we’re only 20 minutes in, so we’re going to ask that the phone be turned off and we’re going to start again.” I had this speech all ready, but I was repressing it and repressing it.’

Worse was to come on a subsequent night. At the end of the final act, one audience member called out, ‘That was absolutely awful!’ ‘What annoyed me,’ Cumberbatch said, ‘was that the audience had been sitting in silence at the end of this very puzzling play, and then someone decided to hijack their entire thought process.’ Such is the peril of live theatre – it can elicit an instant reaction, and not always a welcome one. For him, compelling the audience to concentrate was a modern problem in the theatre. ‘Texting and talking have become a real problem, but you have to understand that you can’t demand their attention, you have to command it. You have to make them behave by your acting, not by shouting: “Behave!”’

Riskier still is live television drama, where there is no safety net for retakes. In 2009, Cumberbatch took part in a project
organised by the Sky Arts channel called
Theatre Live!
: a season of plays which were being transmitted on TV as they were being performed. Of course, in the early days of television – before videotape became commonplace – all programmes were live, drama included, and if a play was to be ‘repeated’, the cast and technicians had to reassemble and perform it again. All sorts of things could go wrong; worst of all, in 1958 a key actor in the ITV play
Underground
suffered a fatal heart attack (offscreen) during the live broadcast, and the other actors had no choice but to improvise the story so as not to draw attention to the missing performer.

Cumberbatch’s parents, Wanda Ventham and Tim Carlton, were active in those early days of television drama. They were just starting out as professionals, and so were already well prepared for pitfalls, having an abundance of stage experience behind them. Such a background means one can cope more easily with various disasters, and Cumberbatch was no different, but
Theatre Live!
was to prove a
nerve-wracking
collision of live television and live theatre. There was no second chance if anything went wrong.

The play was called
The Turning Point
, written by Michael Dobbs, perhaps best known for his political drama,
House of Cards
. ‘So much of modern broadcasting is safe and desperately over-controlled,’ said Dobbs, ‘but live drama, with all its risks, promises something that will keep everyone on the edge of their seats – audience and actors alike.’ Cumberbatch would play the spy Guy Burgess in a play about a meeting in 1938 between himself and Winston Churchill. At the time, Churchill was in between stints as
Prime Minister and felt to be in the political wilderness, while Burgess was one of the Cambridge Five spy ring, passing secret information to the Soviets.

Despite the growing number of screen roles coming his way, Cumberbatch remained passionate about theatrical work. ‘It’s the best place to be,’ he said. ‘I know it sounds wanky, but as an actor the more I do it, the more I need to do it. I know I ought to say my ambition is to take over the world and be the lead in everything, but I’m really happy with the way it is going.’ It was all experience, and in 2010, he would proudly tackle a part and production by a playwright close to his heart.

In 2010, as the centenary of Terence Rattigan’s birth approached, it was time for his work to be reassessed. During the 1940s and 50s, Rattigan was one of the most celebrated of British playwrights. He wrote about a small sliver of society, but with such insight into the human condition that even if you weren’t upper middle-class, it was quite possible to relate to the emotional make-up of his characters. He wrote about the class he knew, but he still understood humanity. It was about the stiff upper lip of British society, but it was about that moment when that stiff upper lip would tremble. His many plays were about human vulnerability. Rattigan’s private life had to remain private, though; homosexuality would not be decriminalised in Britain until the late 1960s.

Like Benedict Cumberbatch, Terence Rattigan grew up in Kensington, West London, and was educated at Harrow School. He gained a scholarship to the school after his father, a top diplomat, was forced to take early retirement. The two were even in the same house at the school, The Park, and both excelled at cricket. He arrived there in the late 1920s, over 60 years before Cumberbatch. At Harrow, one of Benedict’s most acclaimed performances had been in Rattigan’s 1948 play,
The Browning Version
, in which he played a classics master called Andrew Crocker-Harris, a man forced into early retirement, who was painfully aware that he had not lived up to expectations. The play was said to have been inspired by a classics master at Harrow. Cumberbatch had been a fan of Rattigan’s since school days, and now in his mid-thirties, he would be
instrumental
in helping to revive interest in a playwright who had once been immensely popular, but whose reputation had been neglected.

Just as Cumberbatch had been discouraged from making acting his life, so Rattigan found his father trying to dissuade his son from being creative, and becoming a playwright. ‘You can do it in your spare time, old boy,’ he was told. Rattigan gained a place at Oxford to study history in 1930, but ended up leaving to pursue opportunities in London theatre. His early attempts got nowhere, and he soon became short of money, but in 1936, his run of rejections ended unexpectedly. A play he had written entitled
French Without Tears
was given a six-week run at short notice as a replacement for a play that had been forced
to close. The cast were unknowns, and no one expected it to do well, yet it ran for over 1,000 performances.

Rattigan’s second play was a bittersweet comedy about a group who had been the ‘Bright Young Things’ generation of the 1920s. Too young to have been called up for World War I, they had partied hard during the Twenties and Thirties, always reaching for the drinks tray, and decried any unwelcome conversation topics as a bore. Their interest in politics was almost non-existent, and now, at the end of the 1930s, they had still not faced up to maturity.

He called the play
After the Dance
. Set in the year 1938, it premiered in June 1939, but the ballyhoo surrounding it would be short-lived. After being staged a mere 60 times, the outbreak of World War II in September of that year forced its closure. Rattigan found it hard to write again once war broke out. Either he suffered writers’ block, or a breakdown of sorts. He visited a psychiatrist, who suggested he went off to serve in World War II. He got into the Royal Air Force, where he began writing what would become
Flare Path
. After the war ended in 1945, he would enjoy a string of successes on the London stage, among them
The Winslow Boy
in 1946,
The Deep Blue Sea
(1952) and 1954’s
Separate Tables
. He also became a noted writer of film screenplays, including adaptations of
The Way to the Stars
,
Brighton Rock
and later, in the 1960s,
Goodbye
,
Mr Chips
.

But even in peacetime, Rattigan felt deeply uncomfortable with
After the Dance
. He felt that in a time of austerity, Britain would find it hard to accept such detached and hedonistic figures, and so refused to include it in any
published anthologies of his works. It was adapted for BBC Television in 1994, but the 2010 stage revival marked the first time it had been performed in London for over 70 years. Even then, during an economic downturn, the escapist and careless bunch of characters it depicted might have been hard to swallow. But Rattigan never sneered at the characters he created, and always respected them, imbuing them with humanity and sensitivity.

Rattigan’s hot streak lasted well into the 1950s, but the rise of the Angry Young Men playwrights such as John Osborne later in the decade, with more obviously confrontational works including 1956’s
Look Back in Anger
, made him somewhat unfashionable, even though he himself admired many of these new talents.

After Rattigan died of cancer in 1977, aged 66, his work began to be reappraised. ‘He was under a dark cloud,’ his biographer Michael Darlow remarked in 2011. ‘He wanted his reputation to survive, and he was hugely hurt, though he was much too reserved to say it. He said more than once that he would like to write a play that would be done 50 years later.’ Rattigan might have been pleasantly surprised to discover that
After the Dance
, a relatively obscure work, would be at the heart of the reappraisal.

Benedict Cumberbatch was cast as David Scott-Fowler, a historian tinkering with a project he was unlikely to finish. Feckless, hard-drinking and self-destructive but loyal, he was wealthy and made £7,000 a year, which in 1939 was around twelve times the earnings of an average British family. He was self-destructive but loyal. ‘He’s very charming and
charismatic – people fall in love with him,’ said Cumberbatch, before adding, ‘He thinks in very predatory sexual terms. He is a child, like a lot of alpha men.’ But he felt a little uneasy about accepting the role of David. Might it be a little too predictable to take, being another upper-middle class part? Did he feel he was ‘too right’ for it? Finally, he caved in and agreed. Coincidentally, both he and the director of the production, Thea Sharrock, had seen the Karel Reisz stage revival of
The Deep Blue Sea
starring Penelope Wilton in 1993.

Armed with a reading list, Cumberbatch tried to find out as much as he could about Terence Rattigan. Part of his homework included a return visit to Harrow School for the making of
The Rattigan Enigma
, a BBC4 documentary to mark the centenary of the playwright’s birth. He had always felt passionately that Rattigan’s plays were far from outdated, and still had a profound validity and relevance in the twenty-first century. For the voice of David, he sought inspiration from the clipped tones of Trevor Howard, the stalwart of classic British films of the 1940s, among them
Brief Encounter
.

David Scott-Fowler was typical of Rattigan characters with deep emotional scars, where unspoken behaviour was just as revealing, if not more so, than the words they would utter. A perfect example occurs at the end of the play. David discovers that his wife has taken her own life, and alone on stage, steps out on to the balcony, leans over the edge, looks down, and pauses for a few seconds, seconds in which it is made clear that he knows what has happened is his own fault.

The revival of
After the Dance
opened at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank in June 2010. It was an emotional occasion for Cumberbatch’s whole family, especially dad Timothy. ‘He started to weep when he was telling me how proud he was. I didn’t know what to do. I just held on to him. I said, “You’re not crying out of relief that I got through it, are you?” And he said, “No, you stupid boy. I’m crying because you were so wonderful.”’ The acclaim went far beyond his own family, of course. Critics paid tribute to his performance. ‘While Cumberbatch’s physical pose is remarkable,’ wrote the London
Evening Standard
, ‘it’s his voice that is the real marvel: dense as treacle, but unerringly precise.’

After the Dance
would be the biggest winner at the 2011 Olivier Awards the following March. It picked up four gongs, including Best Costume Design, Best Actress (for Nancy Carroll as David’s wife, Joan), and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Adrian Scarborough). If Cumberbatch was not recognised in an individual capacity, the production as a whole won the Best Revival category. It was an appropriate and deserved winner, in the year that marked the centenary of Rattigan’s birth.

Several other Rattigan plays enjoyed revivals that year –
Flare Path
(directed by Trevor Nunn), his final completed work, 1977’s
Cause Célèbre
– plus exhibitions and a season of his films at the British Film Institute. The director Terence Davies was working on a screen adaptation of
The Deep Blue Sea
. Nine Rattigan plays from the BBC Television archive – featuring Judi Dench, Sean Connery and Michael
Gambon – were dusted off for a special DVD box set. But it was
After the Dance
, sidelined for decades, that got the ball rolling for the Rattigan centenary year.

It was during the rehearsals for
After the Dance
in early 2010 when Cumberbatch’s next film opportunity emerged. He was contacted by Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director of the vampire flick,
Let the Right One In
. Cumberbatch made it clear that he would not have time to read a script but was happy to meet up. When they did so, he had a bit of a shock. ‘The first thing that Tomas said to me was, “What did you think of the script?” I told him I hadn’t read it and he just looked at me, mouth agape. I felt awful.’ Cumberbatch’s charm rescued the situation, and he went away to bone up and sent a written apology to the director. He was duly hired and indeed made such an impression that he would work with Alfredson again in 2012 – this time on a TV commercial for Hiscox insurance.